As you can see with this vote, elections do have consequences! Let’s not let them turn Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, no matter how many Koch-loving hacks we have in the state house: An attempt to pass a controversial amendment to a bill that would restrict union dues collection from state and school employees’ paychecks narrowly failed […]

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect: Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street. Imagine [...]

You’ve probably already seen this article about race and the 2008 campaign. Supposedly, if people in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and NY hadn’t been such ignorant bigots, Obama would have won by bigger margins. That’s assuming that there was nothing more important on the electorate’s mind.

It’s an interesting study but I can’t imagine why this would be of any particular interest to anyone. Obama won. That means enough people were either able to overcome the conditioning of their culture or they were scared shitless about the market collapse. What it *doesn’t* mean is that the people who were googling racist jokes would have voted for Obama if they had been more enlightened people. For those of us who realize that race is a social construct and not a biological one, Obama’s skin color did not factor into our decision. If you’re really post-racial, you evaluate the candidate by criteria that is important for successful presidents. A candidate who weaponizes racism, whether real or merely convenient, against hard working people who are concerned for their own livelihoods, is not that much different than the guy who is googling the N word. If anyone is being prejudiced here, it might be the Obama campaign who assumes that everyone in Appalachia is hiding an ignorant redneck heart.

There are some questions I’d like the answers to about this study, which I have only glanced at briefly. For example, what about the people in these states that don’t have computers and have never used google. I have relatives who fall into this category. They’re more likely to google a recipe for halushka, if they had a computer or any interest in using one. They were not fans of Obama but hardly racists, considering the diversity in their own families. The study makes me think of Gallup polls that report on people the surveyers contacted by phone. Presumably, that means landline. But what if you don’t have a landline? How would Gallup contact you to know what you think? A phone survey might oversample older people who may not believe in evolution while showing a drop off of people who do because younger people don’t need landlines. Or, the study could be finding that race was part of the general atmosphere of 2008 and people were following up on stories they had heard. It might be a voyeur effect. And how do you account for NJ turning up ranked #17 on the list? I’ve never met any racists here in NJ and I’ve lived here for 2 decades.

Then there are the unanswered questions about whether Obama’s ill-timed remarks about bitter, gun-totin’, church goers before the Pennsylvania primary might have had any effect on the primaries in that state or the subsequent one in West Virginia. Obama seemed to go out of his way to insult everyone in Appalachia long before a single vote was cast for him there. Why aren’t we questioning his stereotypes and prejudices towards the voters in these states? If you listened to the Obama campaign, you’d think that Appalachia consisted of nothing but toothless, moonshine smuggling rednecks. I don’t doubt that there are some places in central PA where those people exist but I never spoke to one when I was phone banking or canvassing there. Did the study author bother to explore the effect of Obama’s snubs on these primary outcomes? Another question that I’m dying to have the answer to is how many searches of the form “hillary, bitch” came out of lower Manhattan or “redneck” from Chicago, Illinois? Why don’t we find out whether making the men of this country less sexist would have lead to the first female presidency?

Or would we hear howls of protest? Hillary must be judged by a completely different set of criteria. She and her husband were centrists, they’ll say.

Ok, I’ll bite. Would a guy who wanted to appoint the first female attorney general, who raised taxes on the wealthy, appointed two of the most liberal judges on the supreme court we have today, put health care reform at the front of his agenda, got the Family Leave Act passed, protected children’s health care with SCHIP, stared down Republicans when they shut down government and was in favor of having gays serve openly in the military years before Obama kinda sorta got around to reversing DADT, would that guy be considered centrist today?

I have a lot of differences with my own party even though I consider myself solidly liberal. But one of the most striking differences has to be how history is remembered. It is illogical to judge the Clintons as more “centrist” than Obama. In fact, the only way that the word centrist becomes negative against the Clintons is when it is taken out of context and when the comparison to Obama is not made. Instead, centrism is mapped to the Americans Elect, Thom Friedmanesque monstrosity, that thing without a soul. It ignores the fact that centrism in 1993 was a primarily a description of where the Clintons were on the left. On a scale of 1=>10, leftiest Democrat to rightiest Republican, the Clintons were about a 3.8. Now that the scale goes to 15, it is Obama who is centrist at about an 8 and the Clintons look solidly liberal when the issues and voting records are compared.

Lefties seem disgusted by DADT and DOMA that were implemented in Clinton’s terms but forget (or were too young to pay attention) that it was during the Clinton administration when the topics first landed on the national scene and in the case of gays in the military, it was Clinton who brought it up in the first place and wanted to allow gays to serve. I’m betting that many young Democrats don’t know that and their lefty elders aren’t setting the record straight.

What I think bothers lefties the most about Clinton was not his “centrism”, although he probably referred to himself as a centrist back then. It was that he was not dogmatic in his lefty beliefs. Dogmatism plagues both ends of the political spectrum. When people complain about partisanship, they’re really complaining about dogmatism, that persistence in believing in theories in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Dogma has relatively little to do with politics and has almost everything to do with identity. It also has little to do with rationality and a lot to do with emotion.

I was more than a little disappointed to see Charles Pierce jump on lefty revisionism in one of his latest Netroots Nation posts. One of the reasons I stopped going to these events was because I wasn’t willing to empty my brain so that it could fully absorb the dogma saturated atmosphere. Plus, I find crunchy granola, anti-vaccine, anti-nuclear energy, anti-genetically modified everything really irritating, not to mention that people who can’t differentiate between corporate shareholders and stakeholders have no idea what they’re talking about when they wail against all “corporatism”. Netroots Nation is not much different than a CPAC convention. Both entities have solid beliefs that they base their solutions on but they have little to do with observation, data collection, careful analysis, construction of a model, proposing policies and evaluating the effect of those policies on the model. Dogmatists don’t usually like to have their beliefs evaluated.

If there is a recent surge in interest in the Clintons, it’s probably because voters realize that one is still available. And it’s not voters, specifically the working class and women, who are looking forward to Hillary in 2016. No, voters would prefer to have her now. It is the party leadership who wants to create the expectation of a Hillary 2016 run. They’re hoping that delayed gratification will help focus voter attention on the here and now where they have presented Obama as the only choice. But I don’t think that’s going to work this year. And it’s great that Obama is finally getting feisty but I don’t think he’s trustworthy. It’s not just his actions that make him suspect. It’s primarily his contempt for voters in general.

Maybe quality doesn’t always triumph over mediocrity. But I think that when people have had experience of both, without a dogmatic filter, their brains are able to synthesize an evaluation based on information they have gathered, whether consciously or not. I made this point in 2008 about presentation and how a speaker who does his or her homework will shine over someone who has baffled the audience with bullshit. The political consultant class who thinks that voters don’t know the difference may be indulging in wishful thinking. Sure, there are the Fox News viewers who are suffering from acquired stupidity syndrome but what about the other half of the population? They now have the kind of information about Obama that wasn’t available to them in 2008.

It’s not the dogmatists at Netroots Nation that will decide the election this year. It’s going to be the base that the Democrats blew off in 2008. I’m sure the Democrats aren’t happy about that but calling them racists is probably not going to work this time. They gave Obama a chance and he has come up severely wanting. This upcoming performance evaluation is based on actual performance. And if the working people are chattering about Clinton, it’s not because Mark Penn has anything to do with it.

What we might really be seeing is frustration on the part of the party loyalists, Obama fan base and self-described intellectuals towards the electorate that refuses to eat its poison mushrooms. Those working class idiots don’t know what’s good for them, they want a “centrist”, they’re racists, they’re stupid. But mostly, those working people and women and independents have way too many votes. There’s a lot of howling going on right now from the lefty dogmatists who simply want to believe what they want to believe, damn the facts and life and imminent poverty staring people in the face everyday. But might I suggest that calling people racists and politically naive is not the best way to win friends and influence people. Since the great unwashed masses are the ones who are going to determine this election in the fall, whether the lefties like it or not, a much better idea would be to give them what they want before they go to the polls.

As a life-long redneck hillbilly, I can assure everyone that I have encountered far more racists on the internet than I’ve ever encountered in person and, in fact, the largest number of racists I’ve ever encountered in person — per capita– were from Texas, followed by, gasp!, Philadelphia. I’m not saying there are none in Appalachia but I am saying there are fewer than (some of ) the public perceives. The recent airing by the History Channel brought a few “reverse” bigots out of the woodwork. I was assailed by one “gentlemen” who thought the entire show was bunk since it didn’t have any blacks and never discussed slavery. Uh. Duh. I did not support O because he was not qualified to be president. His skin tone is of no interest to me, though his patrician attitude does inflame many of us.

Bill Clinton was too “centrist” for me but he WAS a socialist compared to Obama.

Is being a racist any worse than thinking that those who live in rural areas are bitter people who cling to their guns and their religion? Race or geography, we are individuals. Judging people on either seems to be the acts of those with small minds, imo.

Well, I hadn’t seen that article till just now. It would appear that Obama’s corner may be concerned he will lose and they are trying to pre-spin that loss as due to the “racist vote”. Concern that he may lose could be a good thing in itself if it causes his cornermen to make mistakes which increase the chances of his losing.

I wonder how much of no-votes against Obama even in 2008 could be about trans-convention and post-convention bitterness due to reasons I knew nothing of at that time and which I have only come to learn about through reading this blog. (One wonders if there was a strategeric reason for Hullabaloo never blogrolling this blog). I never read Daily Kos because of the physical ugliness and user-hostileness
of the layout and function. It had nothing to do with what I might have perceived to be DKos’s bias and mission . . . because I coulnd’t stand to look at the screen long enough to find out what DKos even had to say. And all I knew about PUMA at that time was what I read from Larry Johnson and Politically Incorrect Susan. Based on that , I assumed PUMA was a movement to recruit Democrats to vote for McCain if Obama won the most primary delegates at the Convention. I didn’t know that the Convention would conspire to never even count the votes or to mal-assign voted-for delegates.

So now the question is: will the Obama forces gain more racially paranoid black and latino votes by claiming racist opposition than what the Obama forces lose in racially offended votes from nonblack nonlatino voters who resent being race-card-extorted for their votes.

Someone might ask the Critical Race Theory Intellectuals to explain what White Skin Privilege the miner in that photograph has. I’m sure they could spin us all about it.

The photograph brings up something else not the subject of this article. The only way to reduce atmospheric carbon loading is to reduce the burning of coal, gas, and oil all over the world. If we don’t have a plan to invent other respectable work for thereby-disemployed coal, gas, and oil workers; we may rightly expect them to vote their own survival against the carbon loading concerns of global de-warmists who seek to write off those carbon workers as a disposable human sacrifice. And Obama will lose a lot of personal economic survival votes in the coal, gas, and oil belts. (Which is ironic because
he has never actually opposed coal, gas, and oil extraction in general.
His adminstration has opposed the widespread new permitting of a particular form of coal mining known as mountaintop removal . . . which would drive demand pressure back towards the more labor-intensive job-creating deep mining which his administration does not oppose. But how much information about that appears in the OverClass Propaganda Media?) If HRClinton became the emergency-nominee-transplant Nominee instead of Obama, could she speak convincingly to that concern in such a way that the carbon workers knew that a Clinton Administration would seek a Create New Work plan beFORE it attempted a Carbon Loading Suppression plan? If so,
she might be able to attract a lot of Carbon Sector votes that Obama won’t get.

And the paragraphs about the blinders pre-biasing the study and the deceit inherent in its methods are also on target.

Yes, Obama really does have a problem with the base. Small changes in how the public perceives a candidate can have a big
effect on the percentage of the public who have extreme views of that candidate. For example, suppose the percentage of people that say Obama is doing OK or better is 45 %. Now that percentage goes down to say 40%. That is really bad news because what happens at the extremes can be much more dramatic. At the extremes, the percentage of those who say Obama is the greatest ever may go down much more than 5% and the percentage of those who say he is the worst ever may also go up much more. Since the former are the ones who tend to give time and money to the campaign, a big decline is not good news.

I suspect that this is why they are very nervous in the Obama campaign office. Just reporting on what the average opinion of Obama does not tell the whole story.

I have only just come around to reading the linked NYT article and pardon my French but … what utter bs. There’s absolutely no one other than me who knows the exact reason why I google certain words. And I believe that to be true of most anyone else. Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz writes – within parentheses no less:

(I did not include searches that included the word “nigga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.)

Doesn’t that say it all? Apparently he believes himself to be such a brilliant mindreader that he knows exactly the reason behind any and all google-searches, and searches are only raçist when Mr. S-D deems them to be raçist?

Haven’t we all tried to google something which has led us further and further away from what we originally set out to explore? Maybe even forgetting what we initially wanted to know. How can he possibly intrepretate that one way or another?

If I – not to go into the R-thing but rather the more safe [snort] Sexism-thing – were to google for example ““hillary, bitch” I guess that would tell Mr. S-D that I must be a sexist misogynist, right? And not that maybe I wanted to have a closer look at just how ugly the sexism towards Hillary Clinton were? Or were looking for a certain quote or incident? Or were looking for a list of the sexist slurs she had to endure?

Besides, you can’t always prevent ugly things to come up even when you’re googling words you consider perfectly ‘safe’. I remember once doing a totally innocent search and coming up with the most wile, appaling, vicious site that made my heart literally skip a beat. I still feel filthy just thinking about it. Wonder how Stephens-Davidowitz would analyse that. (No, not really.)

While I haven’t read the referenced research paper (can’t open the PDF), my logic – for what that is worth, heh – tells me that you can’t deduct anything from researching google searches.

Yep, when your policies are unpopular because they are line on line with Bush [the 2nd] blame race…1st…2nd…3rd.

Yes , with Obama’s election we overcame racism…but now we are marching backward…we must vote for Obama to prove we aren’t racist. 2012 either you approve of Obama’s policies…or you are a racist. Kool – Aid time folks.

I lived in W.Va. for several years, and I only recall seeing one African-American outside of Morgantown, which was populated by university students from many places. The main “prejudice” I encountered was against “outsiders”, because the big oil companies from New York and Texas ruined the beautiful land via strip-mining, and took all the profits. I’m no expert on mining, but I believe they also bought the “mineral rights” to individuals’ properties for a pittance (because miners often have long lay-offs with no income), trashing the property, and not restoring the land before going back home to spend their millions. Western Virginia refused to ceceede during the Civil War and became a separate state because it has clay and sandy soil, which doesn’t support tobacco farming so there was virtually no slavery. I’m thinking West Va.’s poor showing for Obama is more likely to be their perception of him as an “elitist outsider” than because he is bi-racial. Just a though.

An author named Harry Caudill from a multigenerational East Kentucky family wrote about these strip mining issues and problems in Kentucky most particularly, and about the region in general I believe.
Night Comes To The Cumberlands is one of several things he wrote.

Body: This paper, or pre-draft, or sketch, or whatever it is, started out with this title: "With The 12-Point Platform, this won't happen: An aristocracy of credentialism in the 20%." But then I realized I'd gotten in deeper than I thought -- one of those posts were the framework and the notes overwhelm the original idea -- and as it tur […]

This is a big bunch of catch-up, here, 'cause it's been a helluva few weeks. Gaius Publius interviewed Alan Grayson on Virtually Speaking, where Grayson discussed "how he 'cracked the nut' that allows him to get progressive legislation passed. Part of his secret - his goal is to be a person who 'gets things done for the progress […]